Google and the World Bank have announced "a collaborative agreement aimed at improving disaster preparedness and development efforts in countries around the world".

The World Bank will be a conduit for data in Google Map Maker, to provide it to government organizations for disaster response or development activities. Internet users can add data to Google Map Maker, thus crowd sourcing improving and correcting existing maps. Both the Google Map Maker tool and its underlying data are proprietary material of Google.

The Google Blog quotes World Bank Vice President for the Africa Region Obiageli Ezekwesili, “Today’s technology can empower civil society, including the diaspora, to collaborate and support the development process. This collaboration is about shifting the emphasis from organizations to people, and empowering them to solve their own problems and develop their own solutions using maps.”

The agreement makes the World Bank a gate-keeper for the Map Maker data, and it is unclear how the World Bank intends to make decisions on providing access.

Criticism
The NGO Global Integrity is voicing concerns and criticism. While crowd sourcing of data collection is a good idea, that same data seems to not be available to re-use by those who helped collect it, as the Google Map Maker Source Data License Agreement specifies:

• 10.1 You must not access the Map Maker Source Data through any technology or means other than those designated by Google.
• 10.2 You must not copy, translate, modify, create a derivative work of, or publicly display any Map Maker Source Data or any part thereof for any commercial or for-profit purpose.
• 10.5 (a) You must not use the Map Maker Source Data to create a service that is similar to a service already provided by Google through its products or API.

This makes Global Integrity's Nathaniel Heller raise questions such as:

• Can the Bank use open source tools to work with the data? How about governments? The public? Do you have to ask Google?
• What about small businesses? Isn't the World Bank supposed to encourage economic development in low-income economies?
• None of us can take e.g. a clinic's location and plug it into OpenStreetMap or alternative mapping platforms.

Heller concludes "But the simple and troubling question is: why would the World Bank choose to go with a closed data solution like Map Maker over something more open like OpenStreetMap? For all of the Bank's rhetoric and activity in the past few years around open data efforts, yesterday's announcement strikes us as a distinctly backwards step away from open data and towards proprietary services that lock up data rather than liberate it. We really don't get it."

Other and similar concerns are raised by Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb and Adena Schutzberg in Directions Magazine.